Fire in the Lake (29 page)

Q. What about the fact that the GVN has planes, armor and artillery and the Front does not? What difference does that make?

A. It is only a matter of course. The French also had planes and armored cars, but they were defeated. The ARVN has had planes and armored cars for ten years and what have they accomplished?… In this war the decisive factor is the people. Weapons are dead things. By themselves they cannot function. It is the people who use the weapons and make them effective.
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The Saigon government could not match the NLF, for the systematic encouragement of hatred was a truly revolutionary act. In calling upon the peasants to hate their enemies, the Front cadres were asking them not merely to change their ideas but to disgorge all of the pent-up feelings they had so long held back, to fight what was to them the extension of parental authority and stand up as equal members of the society. To traditional Vietnamese the act was almost unthinkable, for it meant the end of patriarchal society — the end of society as they knew it — and the reversion to that state of bestiality where men have no leaders. Anger itself was a terrifying emotion. Vietnamese society had, after all, rested on the containment of anger, the suppression of conflict. As the Puritans of New England felt that the sexual drive, so long repressed, would prove uncontrollable if let loose in the society, so the Vietnamese regarded anger as a Pandora’s box — fascinating and frightening at the same time — that, once opened, would plunge society into a limitless conflict.
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And, unlike the Puritans, the Vietnamese had actually observed these outbreaks in their history.

After the rebellion of Le Qui Ly in 1400, and during the decline of the Le dynasty in the seventeenth century — indeed in all those periods when there were no strong leaders, no “fathers” to the people — the nation had fragmented. Bands of soldiers had roamed over the countryside, killing, raping, and looting. Like juvenile delinquents, the soldiers had used their energies in an orgy of destruction, wreaking havoc on the very villages that might have provided them with support. During those periods the soldiers had been equals — but equals in anarchy. As to what had happened to them, the PRP directive gave an important clue when it said the masses’ “hatred is not focused; it is diffuse.” Freed from strong authority, the soldiers had opened the sluice gates of their anger, releasing all the “shame,” all the “disappointments” they had felt over a lifetime in their relations with all their superiors, including their own parents. Unchanneled, unregulated, their anger had burst through all of the Confucian restraints and flooded over into anarchic violence.
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In 1954, after a period of such anarchy, Ngo Dinh Diem thought to restore peace by reimposing strong leadership and suppressing the anger, the “egotism,” and aggressiveness of his people. His was the natural reaction of a traditionalist — or indeed of even the most “Westernized” Vietnamese in Saigon. The difficulty was that patriarchal rule in any form no longer carried the same authority. Under pressure from the West the society had “split apart” to such a degree that many Vietnamese no longer obeyed their fathers, much less their village chiefs or their self-created emperor. Bent merely upon domination, neither Diem nor his officers would succeed in restraining their own soldiers from anarchic violence. The conflicts could no longer be suppressed. The dams had already broken of themselves, and no government could survive if it merely attempted to patch them up again. As Mao Tse-tung once wrote, “The force of the peasantry is comparable to that of raging winds or torrential rain. Its violence grows so rapidly, no power would be able to stop it. The peasantry will rip open all the chains that crush it; it will dash down the road to liberation.”
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The revolutionary project of the NLF, like that of the Viet Minh and the Chinese Communists, was to use that released aggression as a creative force. The problem — the central problem — for the NLF was to provide a channel for that energy and to prevent it from exploding outward and destroying their own cause. The containment of violence had, of course, always been the problem for Vietnamese governments at war, and traditional Vietnamese had considered it a task of extraordinary difficulty. Confucius once said, “Only when men of the right sort have instructed a people for seven years ought there to be any talk of engaging them in warfare.… To lead into battle a people that has not first been instructed is to betray them.”
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To Confucius “instruction” meant not military training, but training in virtue, or, in modern terms, politics. And the principal strategy of the NLF consisted precisely in political instruction.

In the course of their denunciation sessions, for instance, the NLF called upon the villagers to focus their “hatred” and “resentment” upon certain specific objects: the “feudalists” and “the American imperialists and their lackeys,” or, alternately, the “wicked tyrants” and “the reactionaries.”
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To most Americans the phrases sounded like nothing more than arid dogmatism: what, after all, could the words “feudalist” and “lackey” signify to villagers innocent of political theory? Nothing at all. And yet that was exactly the point: the words referred only to the people the NLF would later point out as examples of “feudalists” and “lackeys.” The words did not — and the distinction was crucial — necessarily indicate the local hamlet chief, the platoon of Popular Forces, or the landowner who lived in the village. They did not even indicate the stray American AID man or district adviser who might come to the village to give out bulgur wheat and cooking oil — unless the NLF cadres said that they did. In other words, while the NLF cadres allowed the villagers to give free, verbal expression to their hatred, they gave them no immediate object for it: certainly not a defenseless minority (such as the Jews in Hitler’s Germany) whom the villagers might murder as the scapegoat, the ritual vessel of all evil. And they did not on the other hand indicate an enemy that would appear overwhelmingly powerful to the villagers — an instrument of the will of Heaven. (As the young recruit, Huong, had said, “At first I hated only the Diem regime, then I hated its soldiers.” He had begun to hate the soldiers only after he had joined the Front and been persuaded that, as the war extended beyond the borders of his village, he need not be discouraged by the immediate presence of a superior force.) By creating the enemy as an abstraction, the NLF gave itself the time to educate and discipline its recruits: the enemy would appear out of the distance of abstraction only when the recruits had learned to take discipline and to replace their “subjectivism” with a broader perspective on the concerns of the movement as a whole. The force of the NLF’s argument was that, unlike the GVN troops, the peasants did not have guns and would not be given them until the instruction was completed.

For the NLF, the energies of “hatred” were to go first not into violence, but into the formation of a disciplined community. The Front’s plan was to focus hatred upon an external enemy and thus to create unity among its own members. As the cadres of XB village pointed out, the mere thought of the outside enemy operated to reduce the internal conflicts within the village. To take up once more the story of XB village at the point where the Front had succeeded in evicting both the local landlords and the Diemist village authorities:

The Party unit developed and used this slogan:
“Kill the Land Robbers.”
This slogan was welcomed and used by the local people. The farmers now know they have the force to prevent the landowners from retaking their lands and can prevent the US-Diem clique from oppressing the people. Farmers are now free to farm, without paying either land rent or agricultural tax.…

Victory came to the farmers and the people then enthusiastically joined the movement and put their confidence in the Party as the leader of the revolution.

However there were some clashes of interest, some discord. There was a dispute between two farmers over a small parcel of land and each threatened to kill the other. The Party stepped in and called a meeting of villagers to hear and solve the problem. A cadre pointed out that:

“Land comes as part of the revolution’s achievements and as a result of the people’s struggle. Farmers must remain united and share the good and bad. Because the American-Diem clique and the landlords plot to come back, farmers must make concessions to each other to ensure final victory. Only if these conditions are met will the farmers be able to take permanent possession of the land.”

Upon hearing this the two farmers became enlightened, embraced each other and wept.
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The Front took the same approach to the problem of controlling the behavior of their soldiers towards the civilian population. Front soldiers were instructed not merely to avoid abusing the peasants. They were instructed to love them and to bring them into their own “families” so that the villagers would aid them in defeating the enemy that lay beyond the village. Conflicts had to be restrained because of the larger cooperative enterprise. And the soldiers seemed to understand this necessity. Sir Robert Thompson, the British counterinsurgency expert wrote, “Normally communist behaviour towards the mass of the population is irreproachable and the use of terror is highly selective.”
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Thompson’s statement must come as a surprise to an American audience after the many years of American propaganda about “Viet Cong atrocities,” but it would be confirmed by any informed observer of the Vietnam War — particularly one familiar with the ARVN. Whatever the Front leaders felt about the value of human life as a moral absolute, their own self-interest dictated that they impose strict controls on the use of violence. For, unlike the American or the GVN troops, they depended on the goodwill of the villagers. Their task was easier than that of the GVN in some respects, since they had no bombers and their firepower was so limited that their commanders could never be tempted to use it in an indiscriminate fashion. In other respects their task was a great deal more difficult because of the thinness of communications and the demands of an irregular, guerrilla war. Political assassination, after all, formed a basic ingredient of Front strategy in GVN areas, and for the sake of its own security the Front had sometimes to execute men within its own ranks. From the point of view of the Front cadres themselves, this political violence was extremely dangerous in that it opened the way to an anarchic campaign of revenge killings such as the Diem regime had permitted. To preclude such a disaster the Front employed a multitude of institutional controls. In the first place, it used political re-education rather than violence as its principal means of dealing with hostile people. When it used violence, it placed the responsibility for it not with the regular soldiers and cadres but with the specialized and highly professional Security Section. As more than one U.S. government study showed, the Security cadre did not kill indiscriminately, but carefully calculated each of the assassinations for the maximum political effect. The lists of GVN officials to be assassinated or spies to be executed had to undergo long bureaucratic scrutiny before they could be put to use. The killings were then carried out in a cold-blooded manner by specially trained Armed Reconnaissance Teams. The NLF generally proscribed torture and preferred the bullet to any other means of dispensing death.
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In its political violence as in its military operations the Front generally employed the principle of economy of force. Only once did it perpetrate political violence on a massive scale, and that was in Hue during the bloody battles during the Tet offensive of 1968. In the month that they occupied Hue the Front and the North Vietnamese forces murdered some three thousand civilians, including not only government officials, but hundreds of Catholics and members of other anti-Communist political parties and sects. It was this incident that gave President Nixon the major grounds for his prediction that the NLF would carry out a large-scale massacre of Vietnamese civilians if the Americans “abandoned” the GVN. But the attempt to generalize about Front policy from this incident was a dubious undertaking at best. The NLF high command undoubtedly planned to kill a number of GVN officials and other political enemies during its occupation of the city, but there is no clear evidence that it planned the mass slaughter that occurred. The manner in which the killings were performed indicated that in the confusion of the offensive the Security Section lost control and the NLF and the North Vietnamese military units operated without their usual discipline.
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In any case, as even the RAND study used by Nixon pointed out, the incident offered a contradiction to normal Front practices over all the previous years of war and to Front behavior in the other cities and towns it occupied during the Tet offensive.
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On the whole the Front maintained discipline even under the extraordinary test of the American war and even during its full-scale attack against the cities. The achievement testified to the strength of its organization.

Organization: The Liberated Village, the NLF Command Structure, and the PRP

    Prior to the seizure of power, and in order to seize power, the sole weapon of the revolution and the masses is organization. The salient feature of the revolutionary movement led by the proletarian class lies in its sophisticated organization. All activities aimed at leading the masses to advance step-by-step toward the uprising to overthrow the ruling clique can be summed up as organization, organization and organization.

— Le Duan, February 1970
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Apart from military strategy, the one aspect of the NLF that the American counterinsurgency scholars investigated in any detail was its organization, both civil and military. Among others, Douglas Pike, Michael Charles Conley, and W. P. Davison of the RAND Corporation
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wrote exhaustive studies of the organization of the combat villages, the Liberation Army, the NLF command structure, and the Communist Party within the NLF. Pike, for one, justified this special concern by arguing that organization was the most important component of the revolution. As he wrote in the preface to his study: “If the essence of the Chinese revolution was
strategy
and the essence of the Viet Minh was
spirit
, the essence of the third-generation revolutionary guerrilla warfare in South Vietnam was
organization
.” And then later, “The Communists in Vietnam developed a sociopolitical technique and carried it to heights beyond anything yet demonstrated by the West working with developing nations. The National Liberation Front was a Sputnik in the political sphere of the Cold War.”
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